The Two-eyed King

I was aware of Isaiah Berlin long before I saw or heard him or even read his works. My mother used to tell me how, when she was an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1930s, he would take her out and dazzle her with talk of a sweep and brilliance she had never heard at her school for the daughters of indigent clergymen, then with exquisite courtesy walk her back to the gates of Somerville College. The next morning there in her pigeonhole would be a beautiful little note dated All Souls, 2:30 a.m., recalling and continuing the conversation and giving thanks for the evening. It was as if the talk had never stopped through the night, as indeed it did not on one legendary occasion with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who did not have to be back in college by 10 o’clock.

So before I knew anything of Isaiah the scholar, the historian, the teacher, I knew of Isaiah the enchanter. When he died in November, just short of his 90th birthday, he was as much mourned in New York and Washington and in Jerusalem and Moscow as he was in London and Oxford, for he was not only, in Noel Annan’s term, a magus, he was a magus who had left behind him devotees in almost every great Western city. When he bustled up the aisle of the Oxford lecture room, black and compact with energy like a crow about to take off, his gown seemed to rustle with priestly authority and the torrents of eloquence that were about to deluge us to derive from some Pentecostal gift. In no time, the fusillades of subordinate clauses, the cluster bombs of adjectives, the ack-ack of hypothetical questions battered us into submission. For the remaining 50 minutes we were his, and after he had bustled out again with an abruptness that never failed to startle me, we stumbled out after him onto High Street, dazed and happy.

My purpose in recalling those wonderful mornings of 40 years ago is not simply to recall the sheer intellectual pleasure that was showered upon us. What is so remarkable is how much I retained of what he said. Reading “The Proper Study of Mankind,� a perfectly chosen anthology of 17 of his finest essays and memoirs, I had an eerie sensation of near-total recall. We owe this marvelous collection, as we owe the previous volumes of Berlin’s essays, from which this selection is made, to the dogged diligence and scrupulous discrimination of his editor, Henry Hardy. Berlin himself was famously indifferent to the vanities of publishing. Apart from a very few, but justly famous, essays, he published almost nothing in book form from the time I first heard him lecture until his years of supposed retirement. Yet as I read, almost every page of “The Proper Study of Mankind� began to seem familiar: the unforgettable expositions of these strange figures: Giambattista Vico, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Joseph de Maistre, Niccolo Machiavelli, his luminous tracing of their influence through the 19th century and on into our own day--all this came alive once more, and it seemed to me as if I were hearing it all over again in his dark glottal surge as I had in the Examination Schools at Oxford in 1959, the year after his inaugural lecture, “Two Concepts of Liberty.� I have my copy still, the price, 6 shillings, penciled on the title page.

Now with some of those strange figures we did have, even then, a nodding acquaintance. Machiavelli we knew of as a dangerous cynic who, some said, had founded the cold and clammy discipline of political science. Vico? Didn’t he have something to do with the birth of sociology? And Hamann and Herder were for Germanists the primitive forerunners of, or publicists for, a specifically German spirit in literature that was soon to flower in the works of Goethe and Schiller. But of the notion that these figures might somehow all be swimming in the same stream, that they might form part of a great countercurrent in the history of ideas, of any such notion we were as innocent as newborn babes. We were quite ignorant of the history of pluralism, indeed had not come to speculate whether pluralism had a history, still less to notice how short and astonishing that history might be. Since Plato at least, perhaps since forever, for more than 2,000 years certainly, men had believed that there was but one truth, one right way. At first there was but one god or set of gods and one set of right customs and morals dictated by the gods. Nature too had her laws, and when we came to understand them, we saw that they too were unvarying, always and everywhere the same. Religion and the new science of nature had this much in common, that there was no alternative. Like Monsieur Jourdain speaking prose all his life without knowing it, we had all been unconscious monists. And then suddenly we weren’t.

Berlin’s exposition of the almost overnight rise of pluralism is not a comfortable message. It is not comfortable for religious leaders, as Jonathan Sacks, England’s chief rabbi, delicately acknowledged in his address at Berlin’s memorial service at the West London synagogue. Isaiah, he said, was of the school of Hillel, always eager to consider the views of his opponent and discern something of value in their objections. But, of course, pluralism burrows deeper than that and cannot help leaving a big enough hole for relativism to creep in. Berlin was always anxious to stop up this particular burrow. Again and again he insisted there was a common core of humanity and hence of human values beneath the enormous differences bequeathed to us by history. But the mischief continues. Just as monism seeped out from the natural sciences into places where it had no business, such as morality and politics, so these days relativism is seeping into places where it has even less business, such as the hard sciences. It’s all relative; nothing is universally true.

But the achievement of Berlin should surely give us confidence that relativism will ultimately be thrown out again, just as monism has been thrown out of the human sciences, so that today like Vico and Charles de Montesquieu we all recognize that climate and history and language and religion help to make us what we are and that our self-understandings are provisional and contingent.

I cannot help remarking about the extraordinary kinship between Berlin and another distinguished and much loved British philosopher, Michael Oakeshott. True, they looked in different directions. Berlin looked forward with the unillusioned hope of his beloved Alexander Herzen; Oakeshott looked back with a Burkean reverence for our accumulated affections. One was a skeptical liberal, the other a skeptical conservative. Yet each had an acute sense of the variousness and difficulty of human endeavor, a distrust of dogma and a distaste for the rigid sort of rationalism.

The odd thing is that their sympathies--widely embracing in both cases--did not extend to one another. Oakeshott once allegedly introduced Berlin on a lecture platform as “the Paganini of philosophy,� in which I think we may discern at least a hint of teasing. And I vividly remember, after I had written a review in praise of Oakeshott, being stopped by Isaiah next to the issue desk of the London Library and his saying with his usual energy: “You were far too kind to Oakeshott, far too kind. The man has no doctrine, no doctrine at all.� Which, coming from one of the great anti-doctrinaire thinkers of our century, left me decidedly nonplussed, but then perhaps there is no one you feel to be so urgently in need of correction as a fellow-toiler who is almost on the right lines but not quite.

It must be said that in England, for we are a churlish race, there were some who said on Isaiah’s death that, for all his remarkable gifts as a teacher and expositor, he had not left behind a body of work that was worthy of his talents. Berlin himself with his obsessive modesty was inclined to say the same thing. He would, I expect, have agreed with the bright young woman I met a few months ago at the celebration of his life and work in New York who said: “Berlin sounds like a pretty nice guy, but I don’t think he’s great. He’s like Bernard Shaw, tells you a lot about what other guys thought but doesn’t give you anything original.�

If I hadn’t been too flustered to take her name, I would have sent her a copy of “The Proper Study of Mankind,� underlined at the passages where Berlin not merely makes an original point but, in doing so, undermines the pretensions of half a dozen Great Men who are acknowledged authors of original theory. I would underline, for example, most of “Two Concepts of Liberty,� which sets out so clearly the critical difference between “negative� freedom--freedom from coercion--and the more complicated “positive� freedom--freedom to do whatever we fancy, or what is supposed to be good for us--which has in practice so often led to appalling oppression. Then I would underline his demolition of historical inevitability, his discussions of nationalism and the Romantic movement and, above all, the passages in which he shows how legitimate human values and ideals cannot necessarily be ranked or reconciled. The human world is not like the natural world. There is no reason to expect that any single Theory of Everything will explain the moral universe and simultaneously satisfy all our principles and aspirations. Real life is essentially various and conflict-prone, and we should accept and even delight in that reality.

I would also ask her to read his brilliant portraits of Anna Akhmatova, of Alexander Herzen, of Winston Churchill. And if, at the end of it all, she didn’t think he was twice as original and 10 times as wise as Shaw, then she couldn’t be as bright as I thought she was. Above all, his vision was synoptic. For the last two centuries, political thought has been under the domination of one-eyed monsters. Berlin was a two-eyed man. That’s why he was the king.

In these essays there resides the most acute and compelling diagnosis of the century that is now coming to an end. The collapse of the single worldview, the terrifying consequences of the last attempts to impose such a view in the shape of fascism and communism, these are the events of our times, the hinge of our particular fate, and for me at any rate it is Berlin and Berlin alone who seems able to explain what has happened to us and where we are today. Philosophers may still differ as to whether he successfully established a clear distinction between the pluralism he passionately believed in and the relativism he so disliked. I am not remotely equipped to say. But that the light he shed is shining still and will go on shining I have no doubt at all. Isaiah Berlin was a magus, yes, but he was also an Illuminato, the last Enlightener.